Should have stayed in Yesterday
I have noticed that my gaming habits have changed in my old age. Where I once would be all about a multiplayer shooter and with my average skills, I would have a grand ole time. Nowadays though I much prefer a single-player or a co-op game, one where me and a partner are working together and that is exactly the type of game We Were Here Tomorrow is.
The latest game in this long running co-op series sees players stranded inside a facility of Norček Industries where they will meet a Director Kathleen Bowe who will be directing the pair with various tasks. You see, time travel is involved and players were knocked out in 1939 only to awake in the fair future. The director tires and tells you it’s only been 5 years but the level of technology is proof that it’s been more than that. She soon gives up the ruse and players will have to solve puzzle after puzzle to discover the truth behind what happened to them and what the facility is.
MSRP: $19.99
Platforms: XBOX (reviewed), PlayStation, PC
Price I’d Pay: $19.99
To begin with and because it’s the thing that I loved and also hated about this gameplay is all about asynchronous puzzles. The game cannot be played solo, each player is given a walkie-talkie device and you will spend more time apart from your partner than with. This becomes a rather big nuisance because the walkie-talkie doesn’t work 100% of time. Now, yes there was more than a few times I was talking and forgot to hit the button but there were more times when I was holding it down and Anthony couldn’t hear me. Some sort of indicator that shows the other person is using it would be nice to, there were plenty of times where we ended up talking over each other.
But my biggest issue with the game is the puzzles, to be fair at the onset I found them clever and rewarding. But as we progressed this changed as we began to be presented with obtuse puzzles with nothing but pictures and no sense of how the other person should input them. When we started and began to explore the areas, we both would find various hints that were on terminals or in books lying around; these would provide the clues needed to solve the puzzle. Once we stopped getting those things changed, we were only able to progress one puzzle after being stuck for almost 45 minutes, because Anthony just happened to randomly input the correct sequence. The answer didn’t match anything I saw on my side at all, there was nothing that resembled this, so how were we supposed to know what to do?
Adding another wrinkle in things is the fact that each player has access to a device. One is like that sticky hand thing that you get as a kid out of the little vending machines. You know the one, it had a long string and you can grab stuff with it; same deal here. The other gets a device that allows them to create cubes that can be used to get to higher areas, as a weight for scales and later can be powered up with electricity. I will say that figuring out the various puzzles was a lot of fun until it wasn’t. Maybe we missed something along the way, I don’t know; that is the one downside sometimes as a reviewer, being the first to play the games there is no internet to ask for help in most cases.
This was my first time playing this game series and honestly, it wasn’t awful. I enjoyed the challenge of having to work together to find a solution. Even though I felt like I was frustrating my partner at times, haha. The great thing about co-op games like It Takes Two and Split/Fiction was how areas and gameplay changed up. Here it’s always just going to be solving puzzles to progress, flipping a switch, moving a block etc. Some variety I think would have been great but seeing as this is the sixth game in the series; I am sure the real fans know what they are in for and will probably enjoy this entry. We Were Here Tomorrow is a challenging puzzle game that has a mystery buried beneath it and figuring that mystery out is where the real joy is. As long as you have patient friends that is.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.